


Happy Families Are All Alike

by scioscribe



Category: Flowers in the Attic - V. C. Andrews
Genre: F/M, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Missing Scene, Sexual Tension, Sibling Incest, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-24
Updated: 2018-12-24
Packaged: 2019-09-06 17:16:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,892
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16836964
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: Among Corrine's gifts to her imprisoned children--a copy of the card game Happy Families.





	Happy Families Are All Alike

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Galadriel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Galadriel/gifts).



> Discussion of trauma to teeth plus amateur piercings.
> 
> Happy Yuletide, and thanks for giving me an excuse to revisit this gloriously OTT book.

Chris found our first Happy Families deck, with its thumbed-soft edges and make-your-hair-curl _Alice in the Wonderland_ illustrations, in a dusty chest up in the attic. If I’d been the one to find it, I would have tossed it right back in and slammed the lid shut. But no, he brought it down the stairs to the twins and got them playing it, and because I was at the barre I didn’t know enough to stop him.

Later Momma brought us another one, a new deck with bright colors where the cards snapped and fluttered out when you tried to shuffle them. I couldn’t have stopped her either.

I lay awake at night listening to Carrie’s little sighs and Cory’s achey snuffles and Chris’s not-quite-but-closer-to-it-than-he’d-admit snores and thought about Momma in some loud, busy toyshop where everything was fire-engine red and baby-doll pink and sunshine-yellow. What would she have said if she’d met somebody she knew? Somebody who’d say, _Why, Corrine Foxworth, what are you doing here? I didn’t know that you had any little nieces or nephews._

I decided she would have said that she was shopping for presents for children in orphanages. Then her friend would go away thinking, _Golly-day, what a nice woman she is!_ But it was a silly thing to imagine. Momma would never have gone shopping for us anywhere somebody would know her. She might have been careless with her money, like Daddy had said, but she was careful with her secrets. She even kept them from herself.

She must have, or else she wouldn’t have been able to pick up a box marked _Happy Families_ and take it back to us. She picked our presents out so carefully, but in the end, she couldn’t have really been thinking about us at all.

_Mr. Trim, the Hairdresser_

After the tar, we always had to be so careful about my hair. Anytime I wasn’t up in the attic, I had to make sure to have it all wrapped up in a scarf like I was ashamed of it being gone. If the grandmother ever found out Chris hadn’t cut it all off of me, I didn’t know what she’d do.

“I hate that damn scarf,” Chris said one day when I was about to wind it back on again.

“Well, I hate it too, Christopher Doll, but not so much I want to chop off all my hair just to keep from wearing it.”

“I know, I know, Cathy, don’t get mad at me.” He took me by the wrist and held me lightly, stopping me from getting the scarf up to my head, stopping me from going downstairs where I’d need it. When he held me, I never felt pinned. It was like he was the maypole and I was the ribbon furling around him; it was like together we made a real outdoor summer with blue sky and sweet breeze.

Chris used his other hand to comb through my hair.

“It’s so fine now,” he said. There was something wrong with his voice—it had gotten all tight and dreamy at the same time. “It just parts around my fingers like water, but there’s that little buzz of static electricity—there’s so much of that up here. It must be something in the air. I can feel you crackling—floating.”

“It happens when I brush my hair a lot, too.” I tried to be matter-of-fact to push back against how he sounded—against how much I liked how he sounded. “I used to watch it stand up sometimes. In the mirror.” Back when we had mirrors.

He must have heard what I was thinking, because he said, “I’ll be your mirror, Cathy.”

It was true that when I stood close to him and looked in his eyes, I could see myself looking back. His pupils shone me back at myself—this slender, platinum-haired girl in a torn leotard that strained at the bust. I knew I could keep on looking until I saw past my reflection in the black center of his eyes—I could keep on looking until I saw his thoughts about me.

I pulled away from him. I couldn’t stop listening to the harsh, raggedy sound my breath was making; it was so funnily loud. I put the scarf on again. But there wasn’t anything to be done about the wispy little curls at the front of my forehead, the ones we had sacrificed to the grandmother and our trick. I could still feel the warmth of his hand against my head as he’d measured and cut, straight and steady even when his fingers had been all shaky from hunger. He had been so precise. He hadn’t cut a strand more than he had to. It was like we owned my hair together now, since he’d saved so much of it. It was like we owned every bit of each other.

_Master Squint, the Optician’s Son_

Cory’s eyes were getting weaker.

“You don’t know that,” Chris—the budding doctor!—pointed out to me, his tone half-officious and half-strained. “He needs glasses, all right, but for all we know he needed them this whole time. And it’s not like they’re going to go on getting worse day by day, that’s just not how vision works.”

But I couldn’t stop thinking about it as Cory’s eyesight giving up on him, the way a person might decide to stop heating a wing of the house if they never used it. Maybe Cory’s eyes had started adjusting to the newly shortened horizons of our little indoor world. _On a clear day you can see forever_ —but for us forever was just the opposite wall. Why shouldn’t his eyes start adjusting to that?

“Does it make the room look bigger?” Carrie said quietly to Cory.

He nodded. “If the fuzzy bits are far away, that means there’s a far away for things to be.”

_Mrs. Drill, the Dentist’s Wife_

I only found out about the toothache because Chris got a shock one day drinking the milk we’d left on the attic stairs—we’d had a cold snap and I guess it had chilled it more than he’d expected, because he took a big swallow and almost shouted with pain. He grabbed at his jaw and looked all hangdog, so I knew he’d been hiding the pain for a long time.

“Why didn’t you say something?”

“There’s not anything we can do about it,” he said crossly, still holding his jaw. “That hurt like anything. I don’t think I’ve ever had a cavity get this bad.”

Of course he hadn’t. Our old dentist back in Gladstone had been a big man who looked a little like Santa Claus. I’d always thought he was a bigger man than you’d think a dentist would be, but he had hands so delicate they could have belonged to a pianist’s, and he had the nicest voice. When he talked, it just soothed you, like a cat was curling up on your lap. Not even Carrie hated going to him, and Carrie screamed bloody murder whenever doctors touched her. If we’d been home—if we hadn’t been devil’s issue—Chris would have just gone to Dr. Millhaven the moment he got the first twinge.

“I think you’re going to have to pull it for me,” Chris said.

I begged to differ. “Not in a hundred thousand years. It’s not even loose! You need it filled, not yanked out of you.”

“We can’t make up a filling.”

“We don’t have anything that’ll work to pull out a tooth, either,” I said, folding my arms.

“There are pliers with those old tools we found up in the attic.”

“You’re out of your mind if you think I’m going to stick a pair of rusty pliers in your mouth—”

“They’re not rusty, Cathy! We’ll scrub them until they’re as clean as they can get. We’ve got that mouthwash, that’s got alcohol in it, we can use that to sterilize them.”

The horrible thing was neither of us said that we should just wait for Momma’s next visit; neither of us argued that Momma would sneak Chris out to a dentist or convince the grandmother to let him go. And fat chance we’d ever talk the grandmother into it on our own! She would only say that she’d warned us not to eat any candy—it wouldn’t matter to her that Momma herself had brought it to us. It was forbidden and we had gobbled it down anyway, so any suffering Chris had for it was deserved. _She_ might take a pair of pliers to his well-formed mouth, once shaped so well for smiling, and bruise his lips wrenching out a formerly perfect tooth. The only thing that might have stopped her was weighing whether or not he’d feel his sin more if she let the tooth keep on rotting.

He must have sensed that I was weakening, because he softened his voice and said, “Please, Cathy. It’s just one tooth in the back, it won’t matter a bit to me later on, it won’t make me look awful. I just want it to stop hurting.”

He talked me into it and, with the twins looking on avidly as if this were better than the television, I prodded into Chris’s mouth with one finger, trying to feel where the problem was. I was still adamant that I wasn’t pulling anything out, but I was entertaining a foolish hope of maybe improvising some kind of filling for him.

But it was such a strange thing to be doing at all. There was nothing sensual about it, or there shouldn’t have been, not with his mouth all open and slobbery and the clinical feel of the slide of my fingertip over the wet, uneven surface of his teeth, but all the same, I started getting this hot-cold feeling all up and down my limbs. Now I was the one who had _him_ all open and slick and shaky with waiting for pain.

I withdrew my hand like he’d burned me.

“I can’t do it,” I said, looking him right in the eye.

He must have seen something in my face—he must have been thinking about it too, somehow—because he just nodded. His lips were all red. His face was too, in big splotches on his cheeks like he’d been colored up with a paintbrush. His tooth must have kept on hurting him the whole rest of the time we were in the attic, but he never said one word about it after that.

_Miss Hose, the Fireman’s Daughter_

We had to start hiding the candles. Carrie had gotten to be old enough that she knew how to light them, and that should have been fine, but she would light them when we didn’t need them, would light them just to watch them burn. That might have been fine too, but she didn’t seem to be able to understand that there were things she had to keep the flame away from. She burned up part of a curtain before Chris noticed it and beat the fire out.

That was the closest I’d ever seen Chris come to hitting one of the twins. “You listen to me,” he said, crouching down in front of her and taking her hard by the shoulders. “You can’t ever, ever, _ever_ do anything like that again, Carrie. If a fire got started in here, we wouldn’t be able to get out, not with the door locked.”

“Would we burn up?” Cory said in a small voice.

I answered for Chris, putting my arm around Cory and letting him cuddle up against my side. “No, we wouldn’t burn up, but we would breathe in lots and lots of smoke, and that would be very bad for us. It could kill us, even. We have to be careful.”

“I can be careful,” Carrie said, her little jaw squared.

“Careful Carrie,” I said. Sometimes if you couldn’t scare or reason her into obeying, you could still cajole her. “Doesn’t that sound like a girl there would be a book about? She’d go around solving problems by not getting drawn into silly mistakes.”

Chris didn’t seem to appreciate my efforts. He just demanded, “Why did you do it, anyway?”

“I don’t know,” Carrie said. She was still looking at the candle and the long cord of smoke uncoiling from its blackened wick. “It seemed like it would make something be different.”

_Mr. Creep, the Crook_

Chris pierced my ears for me one day. I got the idea to do it because it was one of the first times we found ice floating in the milk, when we had stored it too high up; I fished out a piece of it and remembered how a girl at school had told me once that she had numbed her earlobes with an ice cube and then pierced her own ears with a needle and a potato. I didn’t understand how the potato had come into it, but I had the ice and I had plenty of needles. I wanted to do it because I knew it would infuriate the grandmother if she knew—it was a rebellion I could make that was still small enough to hide.

(Our world kept being changed and revealed to us by the same small things. Milk, a candle, a whisper. We had nothing else.)

Chris thought it was the dumbest idea he’d ever heard of. “You don’t even have any earrings.”

“Momma will bring me some,” I said. That was an idea that had even less merit to it, but neither one of us would have believed that then.

“We don’t have any potatoes either,” Carrie said, looking up from where she was coloring. She had the stormy look of an impending tantrum. “Except in the salad and then they’re all mushy and covered in goop and things. And I don’t _want_ you to poke holes in your ears, Cathy! They’ll bleed and bleed and bleed—”

“You hush, they won’t bleed that much. They might not even bleed at all.” I didn’t know if that was true or not, but I just didn’t see how there could be that many blood vessels in my earlobes. “And we don’t need the potato. Chris, if you don’t do it, I’ll do it on my own, but you could get the needle through straighter and in the right place. Better than I could squinting in the mirror. Think about it as practice for being a doctor.”

“I’m not going to be a surgeon,” he said, but I could see that all the same, the thought had intrigued him.

After that, it was easy to talk him into it. (We could always be talked into breaking into each other’s bodies, couldn’t we?) He stood in front of me in the attic—we didn’t dare use the bathroom in case the grandmother walked in—and drove a sewing needle through my ears. First the left and then the right.

We’d had enough sense to wave the needle around in a candle flame first to sterilize it, so I knew I was safe from infection, but it really did hurt. Chris at least had worked out what the potato was supposed to be for and had used an apple instead.

“I feel like William Tell,” he said, while I stood there all knock-kneed and woozy with pain.

I wasn’t going to say it, but I thought then that he was right and the whole thing had been silly. I had two holes and nothing to put in them.

But then, much later, Chris stole a pair of earrings for me.

“They were lost,” he said quickly, before I could even ask about it. “I’m sure they were Momma’s, they couldn’t really have been the grandmother’s, they’re too pretty, but I found them wedged way down in the back of a sofa. They had dust on them, Cathy, that’s how long they’d been lost. She won’t think anyone took them—we won’t get found out and the servants won’t get fired.”

They were sapphires. If I could believe him that there had been dust on them once, there wasn’t now—he must have wiped them clean on his shirt coming up the stairs. Whichever way I turned them, they sparkled.

“They match your eyes,” Chris said. He shifted his weight around, not looking at me.

I knew I should have given them back to him and told him to put them back downstairs the next time he went, but they felt like the prettiest thing I’d ever owned, and all the prettier for being dangerously won. I didn’t want to think about what day it was, what cold day in February. He hadn’t said it, after all. If neither one of us said it, it didn’t matter.

I put the earrings in then and there. It had been so long since I’d remembered to keep the piercings open with an occasional stab of a needle that there was a puncturing pain when I fixed the studs into place, but the throb was worth it. I found a little trace of blood on the pad of my finger from where I’d fixed the clasp at the back. Carrie, looking across the room at me, was the only one who saw it, but she didn’t care anymore about how disgusting blood was. She didn’t care about much of anything.

_Master Mugg, the Milkman’s Son_

What I could never forgive was that we were tricked into poisoned Cory ourselves. He was so picky about his food, yet so uncomplaining about it, that Chris and I wanted to spoil him wherever we could. We would sometimes give our powdered sugar donuts to him, since he liked them. He could have more than his daily share of the milk to wash them down. Once I saw Carrie giving hers to him too. Carrie, who was so rarely generous. I want to believe that she forgot that.

Cory was good, and his goodness made us kind, and our kindness killed him.

_Mrs. Riche, the Millionaire’s Wife_

_It_ —the biggest sin of which we were accused, the confirmation that we were damned and doomed—didn’t happen the night that Chris and I stole downstairs together, the night when I tried on Momma’s nylons and dress and makeup. _It_ didn’t… but something else did.

We both woke up just an hour or so after we’d fallen asleep, though now, looking back, I wonder if that was a lie we told ourselves. After all, if we both simply happened to wake up at the same time, then it was fate, wasn’t it? Or accident, anyway. You couldn’t blame anybody for an accident. But I wonder sometimes whether we didn’t both lie there in grainy half-sleep, our minds and bodies humming like beehives, until at last we just gave into it.

It all kept happening in Foxworth Hall. That was the trouble—the grandmother and grandfather had built this house of rectitude and filled it with luxuries, with swan beds and fur coats and velvet gowns and black marble tubs. They wanted you to get dizzy touching and tasting and enjoying right up until they started forbidding it. You could love whatever you wanted, as long as it wasn’t real. You could have anything there was, as long as all you wanted could be safely bought and owned and taken back again.

You couldn’t have real family in a place like that. To our grandfather, Momma was just another possession, a porcelain doll that was now being mended and put back in her rightful place on the mantel. When you looked at it that way, was it any wonder she fell for the first man who treated her like a woman, no matter who he was?

Momma hadn’t been able to resist Daddy because she’d had everything but love. And Chris and I couldn’t resist each other because love was all we had.

If things had been kept in balance—I don’t know that any of it would have happened.

But nothing _was_ in balance, and that night, I was almost drunk off remembering the feeling of Momma’s clothes against my skin. I got up and went into the bathroom.

Chris followed along soon afterwards and shut the door behind him.

I didn’t protest because I wasn’t doing anything but idling there holding onto the edge of the sink, looking at where the mirror used to be. It wasn’t worth standing on ceremony about.

“What are you thinking about?” Chris asked quietly.

“Things,” I said. I meant it truthfully—I’d been thinking about literal things—but then I realized it sounded like I was avoiding answering him. “Like things you own. Things Momma owns, I mean.” I felt my lips pucker around those last words, they were so sour.

“What about them?”

“Golly-lolly, Chris, _everything_ about them!”

“Nobody can talk to you when you get like this,” he said.

I hated it when he got all lofty and highhanded with me. He wasn’t exactly the prince of logic and cool reason himself.

I wanted to say that what I was thinking was that we had all been in balance once. Momma had loved us the way mothers loved their children and we had all loved each other like brothers and sisters. But now we four needed each other so much that all the lines were blurred.

And Momma—now Momma didn’t need us at all. We had gone from being her children imprisoned in an attic to being old furniture shoved up here because it had gone out of usefulness. She would come up sometimes to keep the cobwebs from getting too thick, that was all. Now we weren’t people she loved, we were just things she owned.

And didn’t much want.

But even with all that in mind, I shouldn’t have kissed him. I did it not in place of a hug but in place of a hard slap; I did it like I wanted to bruise him and make him red and gasping.

We were not very good at kissing, but we sure did try our best. He backed me up against the sink and held me there in the cage of his arms, my hips tight against the unyielding edge. He tasted young, like toothpaste and slightly sour milk. I wondered if my tongue being where it was made his sore tooth ache. (No—no, I couldn’t have. That had been later.) I wondered about lots of things, but that was the only part I had the words for.

He broke the spell when he touched my breast. Not because it hurt, but because I liked it even better than the kissing, and that scared me.

If I’d had all of Momma’s clothes still—the furs and the silky lingerie—if I’d had the swan bed—I think I would have let him do whatever he wanted and I would have done whatever I wanted too. It wouldn’t have made me brave so much as selfish. I’d be greedy for my own pleasure and weak with it, so much so that I’d want to let him decide everything. And then no one could ever blame me at all.


End file.
